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JG CREATOR NOTES

I had the idea for this book earlier this year when I was dealing with a nasty infestation of stupid clowns.

Talking with my friends about it, I kept cracking these jokes and I thought “man I should write up a book or something on this.”

Once I got that idea in my head, there was no dislodging it, kind of like the movie Inception.

I mentioned in my previous post some of the obstacles I encountered while making this ebook. I won’t bother listing the personal setbacks I had to overcome because there was truly nothing to be done about those, but some of the other issues were:

1. EDITING. I really need an editor for this sort of thing. I’m not talking about grammar, but more along the lines of someone to put their foot down and say “this is all that’s going in this book!”

What’s in the book now bears only a fleeting resemblance to the stuff I actually started with.

I drew up so many comics that eventually didn’t make it in that my place is littered with all sorts of discarded bristol board.

Sometimes I would draw and ink a whole comic, then I would decide it wasn’t good enough and I’d throw it out -wasting days in the process.

Other times I’d think I was almost done, but I’d have another idea and I’d decide to draw that, too. Honestly, I could be working on this thing until next year because there would always be one more thing I could put in there.

I worked hard to keep the written parts as short as possible. I’m a bit long-winded as you can tell from this blog but it’s tough to cut sometimes.

Here’s where an editor would be great, since I might be thinking it’s all gold whereas the editor would turn the tables over and say “no, JG, this paragraph here is a lump of stinking, maggot-ridden horse dung!”

2. SIZE MATTERS. When creating any project, you need to keep your target media in mind.

Meaning is this going to be a comic book, a regular book, a magazine, or only an ebook?

I decided the primary form of this one would be as an ebook. The only problem is when I drew the comics I drew them on 11″ x 17″ board that didn’t really lend itself well to the 8.5″ x 11″ format that was my end size.

I should have been on top of that but I wasn’t thinking it through.

What this meant is that shrinking the comic onto the letter sized page would make it unreadable. The only thing I could do at this point was separate the panels and lay them out individually to have it appear as large as possible.

This ended up adding a bit more time to my process, especially if I had an odd number of panels.

Check out this page from the free preview (you get this by signing up for my email list).

click to view larger

If you notice, the panels are all together, but in the finished version I’ve cut them apart and spread them out over 2 pages.

3. MARKETING. Boy, do I suck at marketing. Here’s a hint for you guys. If you don’t have the book done or mostly done, don’t advertise it!

I started advertising it and I thought I could reasonably get it done in the time I had left before my target date. Well, of course life decided to happen at that point and threw a lot of my game plan off.

So now this thing is coming out 2 months behind schedule. How embarrassing!

Now I need to go out there and try to get this thing in front of people. I’m not the type of guy that wants make a sale at any cost, so I don’t endlessly sing my own praises or relentlessly badger people to buy my work.

At the same time – if I don’t do it, who will?

I have some marketing techniques in mind that I hope will work out, so I’ll keep everyone posted on how it goes.

4. IPAD, IPHONE, EPUB AND KINDLE. This ebook is not truly ready for any of these formats.

It’s shameful, I know. I fully intended on having those formats ready on day one, but I left that part until the very end.

It turns out you need to be considering all that stuff right from jump street.

I made this thing in Adobe InDesign, but I may not have done so had I know how difficult it would be to get a decent epub file out of this program (epub is the file format read by the iPad and other devices).

Even though my brother told me the pdf file looked great on his iPad2 by using the Comixology app, I can’t count on people downloading that to view it.

Submitting to the ibook store requires an epub file and an ISBN for your book. I don’t have either at this point, but the epub conversion was going so badly I thought it would take me another week or so to fix it up.

I didn’t want to wait that long so I’ll either fix it up later or I’ll have to pay someone to convert it for me.

Normally I’m really good with figuring out this technical stuff so it bothered me that I couldn’t work it out right away. So annoying, what kind of stupid clowns made that epub format anyway??

UPDATE: Apparently it looks great on the iPad2 using the iBooks app. Check this video for proof!

Kindle is pretty much out of the question because of the images. I know Kindle Fire is coming out soon, but I wasn’t considering it yet.

Also, Amazon has some bandwidth fees to consider that could turn out to be significant given the large file size of my artwork, so I’m not going that route yet.

ENOUGH COMPLAINING!

Ok, even with all that said, I’m happy I got this thing done and I can’t wait for you guys to read it and let me know what you thought!

In the spirit of this happy occasion, I’ve created another Stupid Clowns poster that I’m going to give away for free here. It’s a hi-res file (11″ x 17″) that you can download by clicking here:

Well it seems like it was quite a learning experience, congrats on finally getting it finished! Honestly, I admire you for putting all of that together- making a book in general is so hard (I am trying to be a writer as my ‘career’) and then add in pictures and having to put all this into a book form online…I’m surprised it actually only took you half a year. So props to you! And btw, I have to say that is one of the best book titles I’ve ever seen! Lol.